hankyoreh

Yi Wol-ja, 50, who crossed over to Korea from China’s Heilongjiang Province two years ago, lived alone in a room just over 1.5 pyeong, or 5 square meters, in area in a gosiwon, a type of inexpensive lodging facility commonly used by students preparing for examinations, working at a restaurant and waiting for the day when she could once again see the son she had left behind in her hometown. She came with her husband and five siblings, but the husband went to work doing manual labor at a construction site in Busan, while her brothers and sisters had to scatter all over, moving from odd job to odd job. Yi’s harsh life in Korea, which she withstood through mutual reliance on her siblings, turned to ashes in an instant on October 20 as fire ripped through her residence, “D” Gosiwon in Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Just as Yi’s family came to Korea to live the “Korean dream,” so too are the numbers of other ethnic Koreans from China increasing within the domestic labor market every year. But like the victims in the gosiwon arson and stabbing incident, most of these ethnic Koreans from China are working silently in business districts with crude environments, excluded from social interest, doing work such as restaurant staffing, housekeeping, motel cleaning and hard physical labor.

According to a report on 2007 international population movement statistics issued by the Korea National Statistical Office on September 18, a total of 111,117 out of the 317,559 foreigners who entered South Korea last year were ethnic Koreans with Chinese nationality. This represents an increase of 2.8 times the number in 2006 and was influenced by the visiting employment system, a system implemented in March 2007 in which ethnic Koreans from China and the former Soviet Union without surviving relatives in Korea are allowed to stay in the country for a maximum of three years in certain areas of work. In fact, the vast majority of those entering the country through the visiting employment system last year were ethnic Koreans from China, a total of 98.9 percent, or 92,771 individuals.

The employment of ethnic Koreans from China who have come to South Korea is realized through job introduction services focusing on the Korean Chinese community or through the introduction of acquaintances who arrived previously. A considerable number of middle-aged ethnic Koreans from China, who represented most of the victims in the gosiwon arson and stabbing incident, work mainly in the restaurant staffing and personal cleaning areas, as this presents the benefit of being able to accumulate money by doing various types of work during the day and at night. It is for this reason that the victims were gathered in Seoul’s Gangnam-Seocho area, where the demand for jobs such as restaurant work, motel work and personal cleaning is high. One director of a job introduction service management office in Banpo-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, commented, “I’ve seen many cases where people look for jobs by asking the acquaintances around them as much as possible, since they have to pay a fee if they go through a job introduction service,” and also said, “With lodging as well, they tend to search through people they know and then live together in one place.” According to an individual identified as Moon who operates a job introduction service for manufacturing industries, “Korean Chinese people looking for jobs in areas like Anseong and Osan in Gyeonggi Province, where industries are clustered together, often inquire as to whether we can resolve issues of room and board.”

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